Unofficial news and tips about Google

November 25, 2008

Google Maps Has a New Interface

Google Maps borrowed the navigation controls from Google Earth and made the transition to Street View smoother. Just click on the small yellow man to see the street view imagery for the current location or drag the icon to the correct location.

Google Maps shows small previews when you drag the icon so you can adjust the position. Street View opens in full-screen and the mini-window displayed at the bottom of the map can be maximized when you want to change the location.

Google Maps will probably add a new tab for the Google Earth plug-in, so this change will make the navigation consistent.

Why did Google get rid of the pan-able/zoomable street view coverage overlay? You can temporarily see the coverage area when you drag the man around, but you can't zoom/pan.

The UI designer needs to go back to UI 101: do not remove major features from a program without good reason (and the only good reason would be having coverage everywhere, which Google obviously does not have).

@ Mysterius what the first anon means is that you can no longer click the "street view" tab and see all the streets that have been photographed show up in blue and then pan an zoom around until for example you find where there is coverage. Now, you must drag that little man around to see if there is coverage in any area and while you're doing this, you cannot pan or zoom.

edit: Sorry, the triangle is there. I had to log out and in again.The saved locations are still gone, however. Maybe some people got them restored because they didn't write new ones when the old ones were missing... I added a couple of locations before I noticed that the old ones were gone.

I really don't dig the new street view layout... I'm almost hating it.

The old ballooned layout was much more pratical in showing both a decently proportioned street view and a lot of map view around it.

Now the horizontally split pane layout si quite claustrophobic on my 900px tall widescreen notebook.The street view is ok if you face te direction of the road but yoI can't just get a decent view of the sides.Maybe it's optimized for a car-like point of view, but it's bad for looking around.

It's also annoying to have so few vertical space in the map.

Then, you maximize the street view, and you can't get rid of that map view in the corner... which is too small to actually aid navigation, but it succeed in getting in the way of the street view all the time.

I think I'll eventually get used to the new interface, but it feels much more ankward than the old one. I'd wish you could opt for the old, or at least I hope they'll introduce the ability to customize the new one (resize the panes and change the split view to vertical when you need it, and resize/move around/toggle the map view in the fullscreen vew).

I'm with Centennial.. Google has been on a trend of taking steps backwards lately by screwing up the surprised neatness of iGoogle and making expandable tabs on the side instead of nice neat ones along the top. I wouldn't mind it so much if it gave users the option to revert to older styles. The new Streetview is a crippled version of the original.

Google maps was better the old way, it ran ok on older machines. Gee, the liberals at Google who are so bent on the concept of "minorities" totally blow-off people that are in the minority that have older computers. Hardly any google product runs on a P3 machine anymore since all of their "updates" and "improvements". It takes a CRAY COMPUTER to run videos on youtube these days. Google is the worst when it comes to wasting screen real-estate. P.S. Google Image Search STILL shows only 20 results per screen with no option for more than 20 per screen. GOOGLE: Fix your EXISTING mickey-mouse limitations before you implement more fancy cr@p.